In God's Own Image - thoughts on race and imagery

This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about for awhile – but up until now I hadn’t really attempted to organize them into something more comprehensive.

I’m going to get to the point immediately: Why is it that 99% of the images of Jesus that I have personally seen growing up been of this white Aryan-looking dude? It’s not because of any historical accuracy – while there probably weren’t any cameras when he walked the earth, it’s a fair guess to say that given who his birth parents were, he was physically likely to be “brown” rather than “white”. Seen any photos of Palestinians, Israelis, or Egyptians recently? Blue eyes aren’t very common.

Growing up, the church that I vividly remember also used the white Jesus imagery prominently – I doubt that this was anything intentional, just something that came to be via habit, and reinforced through merchandise options. The majority of the Christian stores that I have visited in both America and in Taiwan help to perpetuate this imagery.

It seems to be part of a cycle that in of itself shouldn’t be a problem, but put into the context of racism, both institutionalized and not, is an issue. Here’s how the cycle works – when you’re growing up, your critical thought process is still developing, and at this time the power of any message received has the potential to leave a significant impact in your memory. Ever since Mom started bringing me to church, my perception of Jesus as a white man was constantly reinforced; “This is the Son of God.” In my head, God was white.

Again, it’s important to note that this is not what he would have looked like, historically.

Now here I tend to hesitate when discussing the issue with friends, because my problem is not with the white Jesus per se. Indeed, one of the most appealing things I find with Christianity is that Jesus is for everyone – the awesome part is that Jesus came down to Earth to live *like one of us*. And that means that people of every race and ethnicity have the right to imagine Jesus looking like one of them on the outside, if that helps them feel closer to God. Chinese-looking Jesus. African-looking Jesus. Aryan-looking Jesus. Whatever floats your boat.

The problem though is when you’re so attached to the imagery that you’re uncomfortable imagining the alternatives. It didn’t occur to me until college that Jesus is not a white guy with flowy hair. It is wrong to say, “Your Jesus has the wrong skin color” for any reason other than historical accuracy, which wasn’t the point of his coming anyway. The issue I have is that like it or not, the image of Jesus for most American Christians (I say this because I am reluctant to generalize about those in other countries that I am not very familiar with) is of a white man.

Passion of the Christ. 60s Jesus movies. God is thought to be a muscular bearded old white man. Renaissance paintings. The problem is when you’ve equated the image of God as white, and thus “good”.

Again, to make things clear, the solution isn’t to equate God as black, or any other ethnicity. But we’ve got to be able to walk out of the narrow mindset that we’ve been brought up in. What struck me the most about a certain church that I visited when I was in China was that the Jesus was *ridiculously* white. They didn’t even have a Chinese-looking Jesus in China! And perhaps this is my subjective opinion, but we haven’t arrived at the day where it doesn’t matter at all what ethnicity he is portrayed as, because the important thing is what he represented, and we are all able to unconsciously look past the imagery. I call BS. Humans are visually-oriented creatures, and it’s extremely hard to disassociate images from concepts. It matters immensely if you can imagine Jesus looking like you, speaking your language figuratively. It’s what makes him so appealing, because he can relate to you.

I think Islam is on to something when it bans visual interpretations of the prophet Mohammed. Now I do not approve of the law per se, because Christianity needs creativity, and many good things have come out of actions that may have been deemed “sacrilegious” at one point or other in history, like Christian rap or Rock Music. However, the idea that the *concept* of God is more important than the *image* of God is good.

I don’t want to just see black Jesus in black churches, or Korean Jesus in Korean churches. I don’t want this imagery thing to be one that isolates us from each other even more. But I want it to be so when we have images of Jesus on our powerpoint slides in Asian InterVarsity Christian fellowship, we are free to choose the Palestinian-looking one, or the Chinese-looking one too, without people freaking out.